Hello, I'm Varun...

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Hello I’m Varun. This post is a little late because (i) I signed up after the first class and (ii) I forgot about it for the week afterwards. Anyway, I’m a freshman from India. Until I was eight, my family lived in Hyderabad, which I barely remember; the next six years we spent in Bangalore, where my pastimes included extracting the oil from eucalyptus leaves, and finally in New Delhi, where I went to high school. At various points, I have been quite certain that I was going to become a scientist, a historian, a millionaire, the prime minister, God (or at least a demi-God), a philosopher, and in every phase certain that nothing else was worth doing. Except reading, of course, which is why I am now certain that I am going to major in English.

Regarding the question of a ‘new’ story, I am inclined to follow Matt’s answer. For me, the cultural details, innovations in plot or even structural inventions, such as stream-of-consciousness narration, that a story engages, the differences in the way a plot would be told in various periods of literary history are, in themselves, insufficient to make a story new. The million James Bond movies produced, many of which I have enjoyed, do not seem ‘new,’ however sophisticated the concealed weaponry of our spy’s car. Instead, I believe that newness is the ability to create a representation, previously unimagined, that imposed on the world, including on the motives and structures of activity that seem to constitute life, renders it magical. The supreme example, as Matt points out, is necessarily Shakespeare. Consider Macbeth:

Besides, this Duncan
Hath borne his faculties so meek, hath been
So clear in his great office, that his virtues
Will plead like angels, trumpet-tongued, against
The deep damnation of his taking-off;
And pity, like a naked new-born babe,
Striding the blast, or heaven's cherubim, horsed
Upon the sightless couriers of the air,

Shall blow the horrid deed in every eye,
That tears shall drown the wind.

Claiming that this is a rehearsal of a tale of usurpation, the hypothesis reducing stories to plot structures, is equivalent to arguing that the death of wolf by wolf is no different from the murder of man by man. As I have learnt from watching David Attenborough documentaries, when a wolf pack leader loses his strength and virility with age, he is deposed by his pack and often brutally killed. This is also observed in several special of primates. What seems natural among beasts is a perversion in man. Similarly, what is sly and debased in a common murderer, the creature obtained by adding reason and a limited conscience to the wolf, becomes more supremely terrifying in Macbeth, whose ambition is ordinary but whose conscience convincingly intuits a cosmic significance to his actions. With time, I agree that this newness is harder to achieve: how can you transcend Shakespeare? And yet, even in the 20^th century, authors such as Proust do manage to extend feeling and thought so that it changes not only in degree but also in quality: consider Swann’s intense jealously of Odette. Finally, from Macbeth’s soliloquy it becomes apparent that language and rhetoric are essential to the sense of a new story: they do not merely tell a story in a different way but give it new being. If instead of his magnificent speech, Macbeth plainly asserted: ‘When I kill Duncan, I shall not only be punished by men, but the world will explode so that it can destroy me.’ The sense is the same, but this sentence lacks being: it does not believe that murder incurs the wrath of the cosmos. This is why I believe that narrative must be a literary art.